Move/rebind tmux keybinding to a different key without spelling it out

Question

There is a number of default keybindings in tmux that create menus of various sorts. Apparently, these keybindings open-code the entire menu they are displaying:

bind-key    -T prefix       <                      display-menu -T "#[align=centre]#{window_index}:#{window_name}" -x W -y W "#{?#{>:#{session_windows},1},,-}Swap Left" l { swap-window -t :-1 } "#{?#{>:#{session_windows},1},,-}Swap Right" r { swap-window -t :+1 } "#{?pane_marked_set,,-}Swap Marked" s { swap-window } '' Kill X { kill-window } Respawn R { respawn-window -k } "#{?pane_marked,Unmark,Mark}" m { select-pane -m } Rename n { command-prompt -F -I "#W" { rename-window -t "#{window_id}" "%%" } } '' "New After" w { new-window -a } "New At End" W { new-window }

I find them very useful, but I'd like to move some of these to different keys (e.g. I'd like to move < and > to [ and ]). However, copying the entire menu definition into my config seems suboptimal because I'll never notice if it changes upstream.

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Is there any way I can "move" an existing tmux keybinding onto a different key, without repeating its definition in my .tmux.conf?

Answer 1

tmux list-keys does (or at least should) produce output that can be reused inside .tmux.conf or inside whatever file you choose to source (e.g. with source-file).

The idea is to get the output from tmux list-keys -T prefix "<", pass it through sed to change < into [, finally supply this to tmux source-file - (where - will be interpreted as "read from stdin"). In a shell you do this with:

tmux list-keys -T prefix "<" | sed "1 s/</[/" | tmux source-file -

In .tmux.conf you still need a shell to set up the pipeline, so use run-shell:

run-shell 'tmux list-keys -T prefix "<" | sed "1 s/</[/" | tmux source-file -'

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Note sed "1 s/</[/" changes the very first < in the first line, which is right in this case. But if the key was i, you should use like sed "1 s/ i / [ /" to avoid matching i in bind-key. Or maybe in some cases you will need to search for and replace the entire -T prefix … phrase. Also remember that some characters are special in regex. Anyway, if you manage to craft sed commands that do the changes you want, the method should work.